Access now, but for whom and at what cost?

Under the banner of ‘democratic access to culture,’ libraries, museums, theaters, archives, and galleries – the loci of information and cultural provision – once exclusive to elite classes or geographically bound to their local communities, are radically embracing digital technologies to have their content digitized and served over the network. Moreover, alongside institutional arts, informal cultural expression like street art and graffiti in urban spaces around the world are being curated together and made accessible online. This increasing access to cultural content with the introduction of network technologies, digital systems and applications has often been perceived as imperative to technological progress; however, I explicate how radical political economic changes are restructuring cultural domains, and I argue that the culture of ‘access’ is obfuscating the fundamental questions of who controls culture and for what purpose. The paper demonstrates that the seeming abundance of and daily access to culture are not the result of technological progress; rather, it is due to the corporate-led digitization of culture which has reconstituted public cultural institutions into instruments for capital and further morphed and absorbed them into the marketplace.